Now we know what Bill Clinton does between dedicating Holocaust Museums. He has just told Congress to shut up about the massacre of the Armenians that set the whole genocidal pattern of 20th-century history.

The usual memorial resolution was making its way through the congressional process almost unnoticed -- just another gesture of remembrance -- when the president sent a letter to Speaker Dennis Hastert to forget it.

Any such resolution, said the president, might upset our Turkish allies. Officially, the Turkish government still claims the Armenians weren't victims of any organized massacre in the years 1915-1918. They just disappeared one day by the millions. Or they met with a series of unfortunate accidents in wartime. Or they decided one day to leave Turkey for a holiday in the deserts of Syria. Or they were wiped out in a series of spontaneous riots that the beleaguered authorities had nothing to do with. Or they were resettled in the East.

In short, when the singular truth must be avoided, lies proliferate. The essence of the president's letter to the Speaker of the House, when translated from the usual policyspeak, is simple enough: We've got enough problems in the Middle East. Why dig all this up again?
Our own interests in Turkey might be harmed. To borrow a line from Ring Lardner: Shut up, he explained.

After all, who today speaks of the extermination of the Armenians?
The request from the White House was perfectly justifiable in terms of Realpolitik, if only in terms of Realpolitik.
Given a choice between global policy and mere truth, is anybody surprised that William Jefferson Clinton would choose policy? Henry Kissinger would understand.
As for Speaker Hastert, he stood at attention and saluted. He shelved the resolution at once after word had arrived from his commander in chief. Orders are orders.
The speaker did more than requested. He told the rest of us to shut up, too. "Every patriotic American," he declared, "should heed the president's request."
Dennis Hastert's is a new and interesting definition of patriotism, at least for Americans. There was a time when the essence of being an American was that we could stand tall, look anybody in the eye, and say what we thought. Without worrying about how to hold our mouths just right.
Now, according to the Hastert Doctrine, patriots remain silent in the face of injustice; silent in the face of history; silent in the face of truth.
Let's hope the rights of Americans never depend on Dennis Hastert's kind of patriotism. He might advise us to shut up and slink away.
It wasn't always like this. It wasn't like this in the years 1915-18, when the mass deportation and annihilation of a whole people could still shock Americans. ("500,000 Armenians said to have perished/Washington asked to stop slaughter of Christians by Turks and Kurds." - The New York Times, Sept. 24, 1915.)
American missionaries didn't keep silent then. They urged the State Department to intervene. It was a different State Department then; it did.
Nobody would have confused the American secretary of state at the time with a Warren Christopher or Madeleine Albright. His name was William Jennings Bryan, and he not only had convictions but expressed them. He protested these massacres vociferously -- "as a matter of humanity."
The American ambassador to Turkey, Henry Morgenthau, did what he could to publicize this first genocide of the century even before there was a name for a crime so huge. He saw to it that the whole world knew of the plight of the Armenians. To quote one of his newspaper articles:
"More than 2 million persons were deported. The system was about the same everywhere. The Armenians, men, women, and children, would be assembled in the marketplace. Then the able-bodied men would be marched off and killed by being shot or clubbed in cold blood at some spot which did not necessitate the trouble of burial. . . . As a last step, those who remained, mothers, grandmothers, children were driven forth on their death pilgrimages across the desert of Aleppo, with no food, no water, no shelter, to be robbed and beaten at every halt."
Ambassador Morgenthau's conclusion: "If America is going to condone these offenses ... she is party to the crime."
Theodore Roosevelt made the same point, demanding a declaration of war against Turkey when the massacres came to light.
Even today some Americans may remember being told to think of "the starving Armenians" when they were children and wouldn't eat their vegetables. The phrase remains in the language even if the history behind it has been forgotten.
The usual pundits and analysts, if they noted this congressional resolution at all, seemed so interested in the politics of it that they didn't discuss the truth of it at all. Which is how politics grows peripheral, more concerned with technique than essence.
The Armenian massacres faded from the world's memory over the years, but some statesmen remembered -- and drew their own conclusions. Note this passage from Adolf Hitler's table talk, which his devotees dutifully recorded:
"It's a matter of indifference to me what a weak Western European civilization will say about me. I have issued the command - and I'll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by firing squad -- that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formations in readiness -- for the present only in the East -- with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion men, women, and children. ... Only thus shall we gain the living space we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the extermination of the Armenians?"

The Washington Times
November 5, 2000

Paul Greenberg is a nationally syndicated columnist.